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The New York Times, Oct. 11, 2021 |
By Anthony Tommasini |
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Liederabend, New York, Carnegiehall, 9. Oktober 2021 |
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Two Singers Reveal the Core of Art Song, on Stages Big and Small
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This weekend, Jonas Kaufmann gave a recital at the vast Carnegie Hall, while
Will Liverman appeared at the intimate Park Avenue Armory.
Two
recitals over the weekend in New York might have seemed, at first, to
inhabit very different realms of art song.
On Saturday evening at
Carnegie Hall, Jonas Kaufmann, one of the world’s leading tenors, presented
a program of songs in German. .... Carnegie Hall, which sold out
nearly all of its 2,800 seats for Kaufmann’s engagement, is massively bigger
than anything the progenitors of lieder could have imagined.
Yet at
its core, art song is a genre in which music is put, sensitively and
compellingly, at the service of poetic texts. And though the stages Kaufmann
and Liverman performed from could not have been more different, both artists
proved themselves singers who put words first.
Kaufmann, who has been
frustratingly elusive in New York in recent years, appeared with his regular
recital partner, the fine pianist Helmut Deutsch. They began with nine works
that can be heard on their recent recording of lieder by Liszt, whose
roughly 90 songs remain somewhat overlooked. In “Vergiftet sind meine
Lieder,” an impassioned setting of a Heine poem, Kaufmann was almost in
Wagnerian mode, like a despairing Tristan, singing with burnished top notes,
yet shaping aching phrases tenderly.
Now and then, in the Liszt songs
and elsewhere, his voice had its rough patches. (A week earlier, he had
canceled some performances in Munich because of a tracheal infection.) But
he mostly rallied, and sounded at his clarion-voiced best as the program
went on. These Liszt works are marvelous, full of musical-poetic flights,
alternately epic and ruminative. The piano parts, not surprisingly for this
composer, are often elaborate, with daring chromatic harmonies and wondrous
colorings. I was most impressed, however, when Kaufmann lifted melting
phrases with focused and floating sound, like the pianissimo moments of “Die
Loreley.”
He then sang 13 songs by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann,
Brahms, Zemlinsky and others, ending with Mahler’s profound “Ich bin der
Welt abhanden gekommen” (from “Rückert-Lieder”), in an effectively
restrained performance. That was supposed to have ended the recital, after
75 minutes with no intermission. But the enthusiastic audience had other
ideas, and Kaufmann complied, with six encores. During the last one,
Strauss’s “Cäcilie,” Kaufmann, visibly annoyed, stopped after a couple
phrases. “I do everything for you,” he told the audience, “but please
respect the rules and don’t film!” People applauded in support, then he
started over — and sang vibrantly.
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